Kingsolver weighs in on climate change

Barbara Kingsolver has gained a loyal readership and much critical praise for her emotionally resonant, socially aware novels. "Flight Behavior," her provocative eighth, imagines global warming shifting the traditional winter habitat of monarch butterflies from a mountaintop village in Mexico to an Appalachian valley.

Kingsolver opens "Flight Behavior" in a frenzy, as Dellarobia Turnbow, a one-time rebel girl with two young children and a husband hopelessly browbeaten by his mother, rushes up a mountain hollow to a tryst with a younger man. Dellarobia glories in her long, straight red hair, which her lover-to-be describes as "somewhere between a stop sign and sunset ... between tomatoes and a ladybug." She is determined to have "this one sweet chance," even if it means risking her family and reputation.

At the end of her climb, feet blistering in stylish boots bought secondhand for $6, Dellarobia stops in wonder. She sees millions of migrating monarch butterflies assembled into what appears to be a glowing "lake of fire."

"Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road." Convinced this "brightness rising" was there to save her from betraying Cub, Dellarobia hurries back down the mountain to her vinyl-sided ranch house and a life "measured in half dollars and clipped coupons and culled hopes flattened between uninsulated walls."

The pace of the novel bogs down as Kingsolver gives us a lengthy exploration of Dellarobia's thwarted energies (pregnant at 17, she marries instead of heading to college, then loses that baby). She resents her mother-in-law, Hester, and her father-in-law, Bear, who is about to sell the forest on the family sheep farm for logging after a record rainy stretch has depleted the local economy. It doesn't help that she and Cub live on her in-laws' property.

Her discovery of the "lake of fire" ushers in change on all fronts. The usually passive Cub stands up in church to say that his wife has had a vision that something major was about to happen on their property, and they shouldn't start logging up there. During the hullabaloo that follows, Dellarobia's image goes viral on the Internet as a mashup "butterfly Venus."

"You're that famous painting, the naked chick standing on the shell," her friend Dovey gushes. Soon everyone in Feathertown is trying to figure out a way to cash in. Hester leads guided tours up the mountain. Tourists appear from all over the world, along with demonstrators carrying signs to "Stop the logging, save the butterflies."

Kingsolver sets up a counterpoint to the initial Bible Belt perception of the butterflies in Ovid Byron, a New Mexico scientist Dellarobia describes as "Bob Marley's cute brother." He has come to track the possible extinction of the monarchs. As the temperature drops over the winter months, millions of butterflies — and the next generation — are at risk. Feathertown's "miracle" may be an alarming natural disaster, signal of an environment out of whack.

Dellarobia becomes Ovid's confidante, then his paid assistant (and yes, she entertains romantic fantasies). Her kindergarten-age son, Preston, develops a fascination with science. Hester's church group joins in the "save the butterflies" movement. And that's just the beginning.

Kingsolver's focus here is one family, one community, one life-altering year. But there's no doubt "Flight Behavior" is as ambitious as her 2009 novel "The Lacuna," which ranged from the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo art scene in Mexico City to the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in Washington and won Britain's Orange Prize. She's taking on the climate change controversy, which is writ large in these times of drought, wildfires and monster storms.

The novel is not without flaws. Dellarobia's personality seems to lend itself to overwrought prose. In one passage, she obsesses over her attraction to Ovid Byron: "It felt acute, like tooth pain, like falling. Not again, this losing her mind to a man. ... If she couldn't face him she'd have to quit. The loss hit her like a death."

And her biblical references are sometimes convoluted (she compares herself to Lot's wife when heading toward adultery, Moses after she marches down the mountain, for instance).

More effective are Kingsolver's nuanced descriptions of the cycle of lambing and shearing, scenes that show the distinctive personalities of Dellarobia's toddler daughter, Cordelia, and Preston, and Dellarobia's response to the growing understanding of what is at stake as the world opens up for her.

By the end of "Flight Behavior," it's clear that Kingsolver's passionate voice and her ability to portray the fragility of the natural world, and why we should care about it, are as strong as ever.